ABSTRACT
It is generally taken for granted that Vasari himself wrote almost all the text of both editions of the Vite, the Torrentiniana of 1550 and the Giuntina of 1568. Yet it is well known that he was given information by other people, especially for the second edition; and it is also very frequently pointed out that neither edition is written in a consistent style.1 If they are discussed at all, the inconsistencies are normally either blamed on the intervention of various editors, such as Paolo Giovio or Vincenzo Borghini (although the usual role of editors is to make style more uniform), or they are seen as the result of a deliberate decision by Vasari himself. In favor of the notion that Vasari was the sole author is the fact that his name alone appears on the title page, and that, although acknowledging the help of friends in the preparation of both editions, he does not explicitly credit anyone else with writing any of the text, apart from Giovan Battista Adriani for the letter on ancient art added to the Giuntina, and a gentiluomo (actually Giovan Battista Cini) for the description of the entrata of Giovanna d’Austria, also in the Giuntina.2 The argument is not very strong, since it was standard practice in the sixteenth century for books to appear under the name of a single author, and the role of collaborators was not generally acknowledged in the way that would now be considered appropriate. Fortunately, two fundamental tools now exist that allow us to investigate the text in new ways: one is the edition of
* The present article originally appeared in Italian (Hope, 2005). I am grateful to the Scuola Normale Superiore for permission to republish it here; and I have taken the opportunity to add a few references in the footnotes. Aspects of the argument have been developed by me in four other articles: Hope, 2007; Hope, 2008; Hope, 2010a; Hope, 2010b. For a negative response to the original article, and to Frangenberg, 2002, see Ginzburg, 2010, 21 (“A confermare l’opportunità di ragionare ancora sulle Vite sono anche i recenti tentative di screditamento del loro valore e del loro significato, che seppure isolati non possono non destare preoccupazione per l’autorevolezza delle sedi da cui provengono”). Ginzburg dates the conception of the Vite to 1538-42, but does not explain how her ideas about Vasari’s intentions in the early 1540s can be reconciled with the evidence contained in his book about the type of information that he was collecting before 1546.
